Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), which may be enterprise networks, wireless mesh networks, first-responder networks, home networks, etc., are highly popular and are widely used in commercial as well as residential environments. A main challenge in providing high performance in wireless networks is overcoming variations in wireless channel conditions. Because of the shared medium, the wireless channel quality varies over time due to contention, interference, fading, etc.
In multi-hop wireless networks, multiple channels are used to minimize interference between each route in the network where different routes in the vicinity use different, non-overlapping channels. The quality of a wireless channel varies over time due to contention, interference, fading, mobility, etc. When a link of a route is disconnected, the route is broken, and rediscovering a new route yields to large service disruption time and incurs large messaging overhead.
For example, in order to find a new route, a wireless system (e.g., an access point and clients in the WLAN) scans other channels after the original route has been determined to be unusable. The scanning is performed on all other channels to find an alternative route. The scanning time is proportional to the number of channels, and the number of channels is very large with new standards, such as 802.11n. Thus, the scanning time is long, which may cause packets on the failed path to be dropped until a new suitable path can be found through the channel scanning.